Hot Topics:

His win streak? Over four decades!

From Sox to UML, Chaz Scoggins covered it all. Now he's up for a new game

By David Pevear, dpevear@lowellsun.com

Updated:
04/03/2013 11:38:00 AM EDT

LOTS OF BIG HITS: Sun sportswriter Chaz Scoggins, center, is honored at Lowell's LeLacheur Park in August 1998 after his election to the post of president of the Baseball Sportswriters of America for the year 2000. With him are Lowell radio broadcaster Bob Ellis, left, and then-Lowell Spinners manager Dick Berardino. SUN FILE PHOTO

LOWELL -- UMass Lowell's hockey team is dancing off to its first Frozen Four. Another Red Sox season is under way.

And this week, Chaz Scoggins retired.

Looks like we are on our own. From here, we can only guess what treasured wisdom Chaz would have imparted to us on UMass Lowell hockey and Red Sox baseball, the two subjects he has written expertly and elegantly about most for four decades.

Scoggins worked his final shift at The Sun on Tuesday night.

Say it ain't so, Chaz.

"It's time," says Scoggins, 64, who began working at The Sun in 1969, hired to rip copy off teletype machines in the wire room. One night, his draft number clicked over those machines. His next two years were spent in the Pentagon as a stenographer for Gen.

COUNTLESS BYLINES, MEMORIES: Veteran Sun sportswriter Chaz Scoggins with Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk after Fisk's induction into the Hall of Fame in 2000. Scoggins, who joined the paper in 1969, worked his last shift Tuesday
COURTESY PHOTO

Scoggins returned to The Sun in October 1972, hoping to eventually be a history teacher. But the following spring, the Red Sox beat opened up. And while Scoggins would have preferred the Bruins, he gave the Red Sox a try. For a former Chelmsford High track sprinter, who whiffed twice and popped out to the pitcher in his only three collegiate at-bats for Lowell State in 1968, Scoggins went on to make quite a name for himself in baseball. He was national president of the Baseball Writers' Association of America in 2000 and official scorer at three All-Star Games and four World Series.

Advertisement

In addition to doing cable-TV work for the Lowell Spinners, Scoggins plans to continue to score part time at Fenway Park, where his hit-or-error decisions over the years have often enraged stat-sensitive players far more than anything Chaz ever wrote about them.

One player who never complained?

"Roger Clemens," says Scoggins. "I even once called an error on Luis Rivera that led to two runs. After the game, Clemens called me and said it was a tough play, it should have been a hit. He didn't care that it would be two earned runs added to his total. He may be a rockhead, but I have the greatest respect for Clemens as a player."

His readers first knew Chaz as "Charles Scoggins Jr." A redesign of the paper in the late 1970s narrowed the columns, spilling the "Jr." in his byline onto a separate line. The style bosses objected. So readers came to know The Sun's most recognized writer as "Chaz," a name nobody other than Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk had ever called Scoggins. "I don't know why he did, he just did," says Scoggins.

Fisk weaved (and famously waved) his way through some of Chaz's most memorable prose. Scoggins became The Sun's Red Sox beat writer on April 6, 1973, banging out copy on a cheap Royal typewriter, on the day before his 25th birthday.

COVERED THE PLAYS: Chaz Scoggins with sportscaster Bob Costas at a Boston Baseball Writers dinner in the late 1980s.
COURTESY PHOTO

On that 1973 Opening Day at Fenway, a 25-year-old Fisk banged two homers, including a grand slam, driving in six runs in a 15-5 win over the Yankees. Orlando Cepeda went 0-for-6 as the Red Sox's first DH.

"The DH and I started the same day," says Chaz.

Scoggins once hated the DH; now he loves it. This 64-year-old is also fanatical about Green Day, the Beatles, and ripping mean licks from the eight guitars he owns. He rages against WAR (Wins Above Replacement), not to mention Facebook and Twitter. Scoggins' 199 Twitter followers probably have received their final tweet from @ChazScog: "Stop following me and start following your dreams."

Ask Scoggins to recall his favorite story leads, he can't. UMass Lowell hockey radio play-by-play announcer Bob Ellis had to recently jog Scoggins' memory about a lead Scoggins once wrote following a lopsided UMass Lowell loss at Providence. He wrote UMass Lowell "came down to Providence in a bus, and left in a hearse."

UMass Lowell hockey has been Scoggins' beat since 1974, when it was Lowell Tech hockey. He serves as color analyst during radio broadcasts. Here in the sports department, we would listen to Chaz on the postgame show as Saturday night deadline approached, his story for us having not yet appeared.

But it always showed up, on time, never fail, clean as a whistle.

Now the River Hawks are off to the Frozen Four in Pittsburgh beginning next Thursday.

Scoggins and his wife Vicki are headed to St. Petersburg. They left today.

There is a chance Scoggins will be at the Frozen Four doing radio work for UMass Lowell. As of right now, though, he is not booked to complete a UMass Lowell hockey journey he has definitively chronicled for 39 years.

"Just like Moses. Forty years in the desert, I don't get to see the Promised Land," he quips.

Scoggins recalls that only two events he covered "affected me to the point my heart was actually pounding in my chest." They were Game 6 of the 1975 World Series and the 1981 NCAA Division II national championship hockey game won by ULowell over Plattsburgh State, 5-4, at Merrimack College.

The Sun being an afternoon paper in 1975, Scoggins absorbed the epochal Game 6 without the distraction of frantically typing on deadline. "When (Bernie) Carbo hit the (tying) home run (in the eighth inning), everybody in the press box had just voted (Reds reliever) Rawly Eastwick to be the MVP of the World Series," says Scoggins. "And everybody started ripping up their ballots."

After Fisk's famous wave-it-fair homer leading off the 12th inning, "all the writers stood up in the press box and gave both teams a standing ovation," Scoggins recalls. "That's the only time I've ever seen writers, who supposedly are disinterested, get up and actually applaud."

Scoggins wrote four stories for the next day's Sun. His front-page story said Fisk's homer "may not have been 'the Shot Heard Round the World,' as Bobby Thomson's famous homer was, but it was heard at least as far away as Charlestown, N.H., where the church bells pealed joyously after its native son had ended the four-hour marathon."

Read back to him after all these years, Scoggins says, "Who wrote that (bleep)? Me?"

Scoggins remembers having his "Red Sox after 68 years end curse" story cued up and ready to fly from Shea Stadium in those early hours of Sunday, Oct. 26, 1986. He recoils in horror recalling that bottom of the 10th inning, though his recalled horror has little to do with Red Sox heartbreak when Mookie Wilson's grounder rolled through Bill Buckner's legs. "I had to hit kill and turn around and rewrite the whole story in 20 minutes to make third edition," says Scoggins.

Eighteen years later, when the Red Sox in 2004 in St. Louis won their first World Series title in 86 years, Scoggins wanted to just sit and soak in the moment.

"I sat there for about 30 seconds, then said, 'I got too much to do. I got 35 minutes to get two stories written,'" he recalls. "So I never really got to appreciate it."

In the next day's Sun, appreciative readers read, "Admit it. No matter how old -- or how young -- you are, you never thought you'd live to see this day."

Like we never thought we'd live to see Chaz retiring as UMass Lowell hockey heads to the Frozen Four and another baseball season is starting up.

Welcome to your discussion forum: Sign in with a Disqus account or your social networking account for your comment to be posted immediately, provided it meets the guidelines. (READ HOW.)
Comments made here are the sole responsibility of the person posting them; these comments do not reflect the opinion of The Sun. So keep it civil.